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from the 24h37m22s-should-be-close-enough-for-anyone dept.
A team of scientists from Holland, Germany and the UK's University of Manchester studied animals in which variation in a single gene dramatically speeds up the natural circadian cycle from 24 to 20 hours (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1516442113).
It is the first study to demonstrate of the value of having an internal body clock which beats in tune with the speed of the earth's rotation.
The researchers released animals with 24 hour or 20 hour clocks into outdoor pens, with free access to food, and studied how the proportion of animals with fast clocks changed in the population over a period of 14 months.
This allowed the team to study the impact of clock-speed in context of the "real-world" rather than indoors.
Mice with fast-running clock gradually become less common with successive generations, so that by the end of the study, the population was dominated by animals with "normal" 24h clocks.
The research has potentially important implications for human health: clock-disruption associated with abnormal work and lighting conditions, such as night shift work leads to health problems, such as increased risk of Type 2 diabetes.
Wouldn't Mars-born humans gradually select for circadian rhythms that match Mars's rotation?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 27 2016, @06:04PM
I'm not implying that we shouldn't go for it. I'm just saying that this seems to be focusing the attention on one of the most minor problems they'd have to contend with. And yes, I fully expect that landing on Mars will involve a body count, just like landing on the moon and even going into LEO did and still occasionally does.
If you compare hypothetical Mars colonists with the North American 1600's colonists, you'll see that the Mars colonists have a much tougher time of it. The things you need to survive are:
Shelter - The east coast of North America has plentiful supplies of wood that can be used to build shelters, so this was not much of a problem. By contrast, on Mars, all there is to build with are rocks, which can be used for building but are not airtight and are much harder to work with than wood.
Air - The east coast of North America had the same basic composition of air that Europe did. Mars doesn't have anything close.
Water - The Americas had and still have plenty of water on the east coast. It's not surprising that the earliest attempts were at river mouths.
Food - This was a real problem for the American colonists, but they were aided significantly by friendly native Americans both in learning farming techniques and actual supplies to do it. The would-be Martians, by contrast, have no supplies of food except what they bring with them.
Temperature control - The Americas had a similar-ish climate to Europe, just somewhat colder. Mars is much much colder than anywhere on Earth.
Not getting sick - That's the one thing the Mars colonists probably won't have to encounter, but if they do, it's an immediate death sentence.
So I stand by my statement that it will be the hardest thing we've ever done. We should still do it though.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 27 2016, @07:31PM
No argument - I see Mars colonization as growing beyond the ISS successes - less frequent restocking, but bountiful natural resources. Lots of sand, which with the right binding agent should make for sturdy, reasonably airtight concrete structures, and I believe there's some folks working with Martian soil analysis with the goal of producing a local-made binding agent as well.
And of course lots of potential to harness micro- and nano-cellulose grown from local resources as an incredible building material. Nanocellulose especially has incredible potential on a dry planet - comparable strength to aluminum, translucent, and extremely gas-impermeable. Microcellulose is more like particleboard "clay" in comparison, which still has immense potential for furniture and the like. Both can be made from plant waste using only mechanical processing, so should be readily compostable as well. And both act like a strong water-based clay - malleable when wet, rigid when dry, allowing for easy repairs. Got a hole in your dome's airtight lining and no patches handy? Just scrape off the waterproof paint, get the area good and wet, and massage it a bit so it flows together again (provided the concrete structure slows air leaks enough that the "plastic" doesn't flow appreciably while drying... though that actually has some really cool potential in it's own right if you can do it in a controlled fashion - think that "plastic bubble" kids toy dome on a living-dome scale.)
As for food, air, and water - those are all interconnected, call it ecosystem, and Biosphere II showed that we can mostly manage an artificial system in a pseudo--steady-state. Adding the local availabiliy of water, CO2, and whatever useful minerals we can find should go a long way towards making the system stable and capable of growth, though obviously it might take years before whatever seed ecosystem we took with us grew large and strong enough to support a colony, and we would be heavily dependent on imported supplies until then.
Heat may be a challenge, but thermodynamics dictates that pretty much any power source other than solar or p-B fusion is going to produce more heat than electricity. And it's worth considering that while Mars is cold, it's also essentially a giant vacuum thermos - you only have to insulate yourself from the ground - the air is so thin as to be effectively temperatureless for most purposes.
As for being sick - it seems extremely unlikely that they will be able to purge infectious diseases from the colonists, but that doesn't really matter, The vast majority of modern medicine miracles boil down to antibiotics, and penicillin is still one of the most powerful universal antibiotics available, and is basically just easily grown mold. We stopped using it not so much because newer drugs are more effective, but because it's not protected by patents (no inflated profits to be had), and over-use was beginning to breed penicillin-resistant diseases (such resistance tends to fades rapidly in its absence). And possibly slightly fewer patient reactions with other drugs (though I'm reminded that heroin was invented as a safer, less addictive alternative to opium...)
As for non-infectious diseases - well, yeah, the population is going to need to grow pretty large before it can start supporting cardiac specialists and the like, or for that matter the long-term bedridden. So end-of-life may occur much more rapidly than on Earth. On the other hand that could be a good thing. In the US especially we've become obsessed with extending life long beyond the point where it's worth living, just because we can (and everyone in the medical profession stands to profit from it). But there's beginning to be a cultural backlash, could be Mars returns to sanity by the simple expedient of being unable to afford extreme measures. Besides there will almost certainly be good general surgeons backed by the best in expert systems and non-emergency consultations with specialists on Earth.
It's not like the medical knowledge will be lost - just a lot of the more extreme technology. And for that... well there's some awesome work being done targeting rural India, Africa, and similar money-poor, off-grid hospitals to develop low-tech hardware as a 90% solution to the fact that Western medical hardware rapidly becomes useless junk without a steady supply of reliable power, expensive ongoing parts and maintenance, and well-trained operators. Such simple, durable hardware should be easy to repurpose for Mars.